by Justin D'Ath
‘Well?’ he said, ignoring her. ‘Wouldn’t you like to have a nightcap with your old man?’
‘I ... um ... don’t like whithky.’
‘That does surprise me,’ Leo said. He leaned across the table and beckoned Wolfgang to do likewise. ‘You know,’ he said confidingly, their faces barely twenty centimetres apart, ‘I could swear that’s whisky I can smell on your breath.’
I hate my father, Wolfgang thought. ‘You’re dead right, Dad: it is whisky. I stole it, okay? I stole your frigging whisky, the same as you stole my black butterfly wing.’
Leo’s face drained of all expression. ‘What black butterfly?’ he asked.
‘Wolfgang.’ Sylvia caught his eye and shook her head warningly. ‘We found the wing.’
‘He stole it again.’
‘What black butterfly?’ Leo repeated.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Sylvia.
‘Black, you say? Was it one of the crows?’
Wolfgang sighed. ‘I don’t know, Dad.’
Above the table, half a dozen flying ants spun around the light. Wolfgang wondered if they were like goldfish, if they had no memory and every revolution felt like it was the first. He shivered. Was Alzheimer’s hereditary?
‘Have the others gone home?’ Sylvia asked.
‘They should be there by now. And, Mum, don’t worry about Merri – she’s fine.’
‘Her mother was very worried.’
‘Nothing happened to her.’
‘Being a parent isn’t an easy job, Wolfgang.’
‘I know that.’
‘I think you should buy your father another bottle of whisky, don’t you?’
Wolfgang put a finger into his glass to rescue a winged ant captured on the water’s trembling surface. ‘I’ll give you the money for it.’
‘Don’t give it to me, give it to your father.’
‘Whatever,’ Wolfgang said. It felt strange having this conversation with his father right there. He carried the ant over to the sliding door and released it into the night.
‘Her name isn’t Mary,’ Leo said behind him.
‘Merri,’ he said. ‘As in Merry Christmas.’
‘Not her.’
It was pointless. ‘I’m off to bed now,’ Wolfgang said. ‘Good night, Mum. Good night, Dad.’
‘The coma girl.’
Wolfgang stopped in the kitchen doorway and turned around. ‘Audrey Babacan?’
‘She phoned while you were out,’ his father said.
Sylvia let out a weary sigh. ‘It was Lorraine Taylor. I was the one who spoke to her.’
‘I’m perfectly aware you spoke to Lorraine Taylor, dear. But the Babacan girl rang as well.’
‘When? I didn’t hear the phone.’
‘Perhaps you were in the bathroom,’ the old man said with an irritated shrug. ‘But I distinctly remember speaking to the Babacan girl.’
‘What did she want?’ Wolfgang asked.
‘To talk to you,’ his father said. ‘But when I told her you weren’t here, she said something about you being at the pool, and then – rude young woman – she hung up in my ear.’
Wolfgang looked down at his arm. A large area of skin just below his right elbow had begun to tingle.
50
Wolfgang couldn’t sleep. He lay in bed staring up at the scatter of luminous stars, planets and meteors that decorated his bedroom ceiling. There was even a Southern Cross. His father had put them up for him on his fifth birthday. Eleven years ago Leo would have been in his mid-sixties, and Sylvia not far off fifty, yet Wolfgang had never thought of them as old until he started school and saw the other parents. It wasn’t fair to have children when you were old enough to be grandparents. When you couldn’t play soccer with your kids, or take them bodyboarding or hiking or bike riding. When you came to school interviews wearing an ancient brown suit jacket with leather buttons and asked your son’s teacher how could she teach English when she seemed incapable of correcting a ten-year-old’s punctuation and spelling? When you couldn’t even be trusted to pass on a phone message.
Why would Audrey have rung tonight if she thought he was at the pool? How could she possibly have known he was at the pool? The silly old fool was muddled, as usual. Audrey probably rang a week ago.
Wolfgang ran his fingers over the tingling spot below his right elbow. What exactly had happened tonight? He had been so sure he’d taken the skin off his arm. And then that whole confusing episode at the pool: how long had he been unconscious? Why, if he’d been underwater all that time, hadn’t he drowned? And how had he managed to travel the length of the pool, from the low end to the high end, without the others seeing him?
He closed his eyes and the stars turned instantly to butterflies – white, luminous butterflies that danced and shimmered on the backs of his eyelids. It was like a dream yet Wolfgang wasn’t asleep. In their random dips and swerves, the glowing butterflies seemed alive, independent of his imagination or whatever part of his brain was creating them. They seemed real. A shiver passed through him and he fumbled for the lamp switch. Light flooded the room. Now he was surrounded by real butterflies, his butterflies: all two hundred and forty-two of them in their specially built, glass-fronted cases, their multi-hued wings set flat in attitudes of perpetual flight.
When he was younger, when the collection still belonged to his father, Wolfgang had been mildly repelled by the notion of keeping dead butterflies. But he no longer felt that way. A butterfly’s natural lifespan was tragically brief. Within a few days of emerging from the pupa, this most exquisite of creatures would be battered, faded, ruined. And it would be dead within a fortnight, usually by some violent or unpleasant means – eaten by a bird, splattered on a car windscreen, or entangled in a spider’s web. By capturing and humanely killing them at the height of their perfection, Wolfgang was not only sparing his butterflies the pain and degradation life had in store for them, but he was preserving their beauty for years to come. Giving them a shot at immortality.
He rolled out of bed, moved his chair over to the wardrobe and brought down the suitcase. It wasn’t only about beauty. To own all these butterflies made him rich in a way that money never could. Carefully, almost reverently, Wolfgang lifted out the setting-tray that held specimen number two hundred and forty-three and angled its velvety black wings to capture the light.
To have a butterfly named after him would make him the richest person on Earth.
There was a loud knocking on the front door. Wolfgang gave a start and placed the setting-tray on his desk. Who could it be, so late at night? Steve or Mark, perhaps. Audrey? Quickly he pulled on a pair of shorts and picked up a T-shirt off the floor. The knocking was repeated, louder this time. Wolfgang gritted his teeth. Shut up, you idiots, you’ll wake the oldies! He hurried past his parents’ bedroom, hoping the noise hadn’t woken them, putting on the T-shirt as he went. He creaked the front door open.
‘Good evening,’ said a tall young policeman standing beneath the porch light. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you. Are you Wolfgang Mulqueen?’
Wolfgang recognised his voice. He was one of the two policemen who had come to the pool. ‘Y-yeth. Is thomething wrong?’
‘Have you been home all evening?’
Wolfgang stepped barefoot outside and pulled the door gently closed behind him. He didn’t want his parents to hear this. With any luck, they were still asleep. ‘I ... um ... I wath at a party at a friend’th plathe,’ he said quietly.
The policeman frowned slightly, as people often did when they first encountered Wolfgang’s lisp. ‘And you went nowhere else?’ he asked.
There was a car in the driveway; its headlights dazzled him.
‘No.’
‘You didn’t go to the pool?’
‘No,’ Wolfgang said. He watched a large moth spiralling against one of the headlights. ‘The pool clothed at thix.’
The policeman nodded. ‘Where was this party?’
‘At ... um ... a friend ...’
There was
something happening in the car. The interior light had come on and the rear door was swinging open. A policeman in the front passenger’s seat had turned around to look over into the back. ‘Stay in the car, please,’ he said loudly.
‘Is he here?’ someone asked – a girl’s voice – and Wolfgang’s heart lurched.
‘Audrey?’
The second policeman, an older man with sergeant’s stripes, rose out of the car at the same moment as Audrey scrambled out on the other side.
‘Please get back in the car, Miss,’ he said over its roof.
Audrey took no notice. She felt her way along and around the open car door, then came shuffling towards the house, hands out in front of her, stroking the air with her fingertips. ‘Wolfgang?’ she said.
‘I’m here.’
It was almost a race as he and the two policemen converged on her. Wolfgang reached her first.
‘Audrey, what’s going on?’
Instead of answering, she slid her arms around him and pulled him fiercely to her, bumping the point of her nose on his chin. It was quite a hard blow and must have hurt her, but she made no sound.
‘Are you okay?’ Wolfgang whispered into the sweaty thicket of her hair. He felt her nod. ‘What are you doing here?’
Audrey pulled back from him and seemed to search his face with her damp, sightless eyes. ‘I thought you were gone.’
‘I only went to Steve Taylor’s,’ Wolfgang said, wondering at her choice of words. Gone?
‘Who’s Steve Taylor?’ asked one of the policemen.
Wolfgang lifted his right foot and rubbed the heel where he’d trodden on a sharp stone. ‘A friend.’
‘Is that where the party was?’
‘Yes.’
‘He claims he was at a party,’ the first policeman said to the sergeant.
‘We can check that out easily enough. Where was the party?’
Wolfgang watched with a sense of resignation as the young policeman wrote Steve’s name, address and phone number in a small notebook, tilting it sideways to catch the illumination from the car’s headlights. They would contact Steve’s parents and learn about the four of them going AWOL from the party. Even so, there was no proof they had been at the pool. Unless someone talked. Steve and Mark wouldn’t say anything, but what about Merri? Perhaps she had gone home and fessed up to her parents, and her parents had already spoken to the police. That would explain why the police were here questioning him. But why were they taking down Steve’s details if they already had them?
And why was Audrey here?
‘Where can you be contacted tomorrow if we need to speak to you?’ the young policeman asked.
‘I should be home most of the day,’ Wolfgang said. He gave his phone number. No way would he tell them he worked at the pool, nor that he had access to the keys. They could find that out for themselves. Wolfgang’s gaze shifted to Audrey. Unless they already knew.
‘You’re Leo Mulqueen’s boy, aren’t you,’ said the sergeant. ‘How’s he doing these days?’
‘Yeah, he’th okay,’ Wolfgang said.
‘I used to bring my dogs to him. Tell him Garry Kuroff says hullo.’
‘I’ll do that.’
The sergeant chuckled. ‘Ask him about the staffy that swallowed a tennis ball. That was one of mine.’
‘Your dog swallowed a tennis ball, Sarge?’ asked the other policeman.
‘Grover, the old black one. It was years ago, when he was a pup. Ask your dad about it,’ he said to Wolfgang.
‘I will,’ Wolfgang said dutifully. Not that he expected his father to remember.
The sergeant turned back to his younger colleague. ‘I think we can leave it there, Sean. The lad’s obviously okay. We’ll run the young lady home and everyone can get a bit of sleep.’
‘I can make my own way home,’ Audrey said.
‘No, no, we’ll drive you.’
‘Am I under arrest?’ she asked.
‘Of course not. But it’s my responsibility,’ said the sergeant, ‘to see that you get home safely.’
‘Wolfgang can take me home.’ Audrey found his hand and squeezed it. ‘Is that okay, sweetie? Will you drive me?’
Sweetie. ‘I gueth tho,’ he said.
The sergeant cocked his head to one side. ‘How old are you, lad?’
‘N-nineteen,’ Wolfgang stammered, remembering, as soon as it was out, that Audrey was the one who was nineteen; he was supposed to be twenty.
‘So you’re still on P plates. If you had any alcohol at that party earlier, I hope you won’t be attempting to drive.’
‘Of courthe not.’
‘Then you can walk me home,’ Audrey said brightly.
51
‘I thought you were twenty,’ she said.
Wolfgang watched the police car’s red tail-lights disappear down the street. ‘I got a bit confuthed – all the questionth they were athking.’
‘I’m sorry about that.’
‘You’re thorry?’ he said.
‘I guess I kind of brought them here.’
They were standing near the top of the driveway, less than half a metre apart but no longer touching. The pale light from the porch behind her made copper highlights in Audrey’s hair.
‘You brought the police here?’ Wolfgang said, his heart rate rising.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. Was that the glint of a tear on her left lower eyelid? ‘Wolfgang, I was so scared! I thought you were gone.’
‘Gone where?’
‘You’ll think I’m crazy.’
Crazy? This was someone who claimed she was nocturnal. Who said she saw angels. ‘Just tell me what’s going on,’ he said.
Audrey rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand, first the right eye, then the left. ‘Is there somewhere we can sit down?’
‘Come with me.’ He took her by the hand and led her round to the picnic setting beneath a vine-entangled pergola at the rear of the house. They sat side by side on one of the hard bench seats. Audrey let out a long, slow breath.
‘You don’t have any cigarettes, do you?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘Not even inside? I really could do with one now.’
‘I don’t smoke,’ Wolfgang heard himself say.
‘Since when?’ asked Audrey. And then she said, her voice slightly querulous: ‘You didn’t tell me you were giving up.’
‘I never took them up in the first place. I just pretended I did.’
‘You pretended to take up smoking?’
It was completely dark under the pergola. Wolfgang felt as blind as Audrey. ‘I know it was kind of dishonest,’ he said into the confessional quiet that surrounded them, ‘but I wanted you to like me.’
‘What’s smoking got to do with me liking you?’
‘I was scared you’d think I was ... I don’t know ... immature.’
He waited nervously for her response. When the silence had stretched to seven or eight seconds, he moistened his lips and said he was sorry.
‘No, don’t apologise,’ Audrey told him. She found his face with her fingertips and kissed him softly on the cheek. ‘I’m flattered. Nobody’s ever taken up smoking for me before. You’re very sweet.’
Wolfgang slapped a mosquito away from his ear. There was something mildly disappointing about being called sweet. ‘What happened with the police?’ he asked.
‘They found me at the pool. Someone had called an ambulance or something and they thought it was me.’
‘You were at the pool?’
‘Not at the pool exactly. I was outside the fence.’
‘What were you doing there?’
‘Looking for you.’ Audrey lowered her voice to little more than a whisper. ‘Sometimes I have these dreams about the pool. They’re not dreams exactly, they’re more like visions. I can have them when I’m awake. The weird thing is, I think they’re real; I think they really happen. Tonight I had one about you.’
Wolfgang found himself nodding; he wasn’t s
ure why. Was she claiming to be psychic? ‘So you dreamed I was at the pool and you went down to say hullo.’
‘Don’t laugh at me, Wolfgang.’
‘Well, it is all very Medium, you have to admit.’
Audrey let out a big weary sigh. ‘You were wearing something on your head – some kind of helmet?’
Wolfgang peered at the slight fault in the darkness that was Audrey’s face. ‘Who have you been talking to?’
‘Nobody. I told you, it was a dream.’
‘Okay, so who was with me?’
Audrey was silent for a moment. ‘I don’t know. I only ever see the person that goes through.’
‘Goes through where?’
‘Don’t you remember?’ She sounded disappointed.
‘What am I supposed to remember?’
‘You went to the dream place.’
‘The dream place?’ he said uncertainly.
‘It’s like this whole other world that’s kind of under the pool,’ explained Audrey. ‘You must remember something?’
Wolfgang shrugged. ‘It was your dream, not mine.’
‘But you were there – I saw you!’
He looked up through a gap in the vine at a single shimmering star almost directly above where Audrey sat. It would be awful being blind. He didn’t blame her for imagining some kind of fantasy world where she could see.
‘I knew you’d think I was crazy,’ she mumbled.
‘I guess all dreams are kind of crazy when you think about it.’
‘Not if they really happen.’
Wolfgang brushed a tickling insect off his leg. ‘Okay. There’s this underwater world at the bottom of the pool. What am I supposed to have done when I went there?’
‘You don’t believe me, do you?’
‘It was a dream, Audrey!’
She said nothing. He heard a rustle of clothing and realised she had risen to her feet.
‘Audrey?’
‘I think I’ll go home now.’
Wolfgang stood up, too. He reached out and his fingers felt fabric and the soft give of flesh beneath it. ‘Don’t go,’ he said. ‘I’m just having a bit of trouble getting my head around what you’re telling me. Where exactly is this place?’
‘Under the pool.’